


water, quivering

by Nerdanel (telanaris)



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: F/M, It gets out of hand, Lavellan takes a bath, NSFW, PWP, Smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-28
Updated: 2017-09-28
Packaged: 2019-01-06 13:29:53
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,922
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12212220
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/telanaris/pseuds/Nerdanel
Summary: He was thorough in his attentions. The grip on her heel was gentle but firm, held fast and steady as his other hand pressed the rag—now bubbling with suds—between each of her toes, careful to leave not a spot of her foot uncleansed. She sucked in her breath when he brought the rag down and pressed with his thumb into the arch of her foot, his fingers wrapping around the front of her foot to better accommodate the pressure of his thumb as he squeezed, stroked, kneaded.





	water, quivering

_“Inquisitor, are you blushing?”_

She remembered the bend in the river where they used to bathe in the summer: smooth stones and cattails lining the banks, and the swaying vines of that gnarled old willow tree. The way the river would swell golden with those willow leaves come autumn. Nakedness just another state of being, nothing to do with arousal or shame, just washing off the stickiness of summer in the cool bubbling, the river laughing in time with innocent play, the delight of the children.

Never had bathing meant anything like this— _obscene—_

He had happened upon her while the bath water was still scalding, just stepped out of her clothes and steeping; she hadn’t turned him away. She’d thought he’d mind his own business. Sit at her desk. Read.

He had asked if he should return later. When she had dismissed the suggestion—“ _Don’t be silly_.”—he’d taken it as an invitation.

He had started with her feet.

“May I?” Solas asked, drawing a stool near to the bathside, rolling up his sleeves. She’d made a face at him, practically balked.

“Why?”

The smile he’d made in response should have been warning enough: slightly crooked, hiding an intent she could not understand. “You must be tired from your journey back to Skyhold, are you not? Allow me to help you.”

She had acquiesced; he had taken the rag and the bar of soap ( _scented soap_ , a luxury that had confounded her the first time she’d encountered it) and reached his forearm under the water, cupped his hand around the heel of her foot and raised it out of the water.

(The musical sound of the water running off her leg and splashing into the bath; the way it reflected the sunlight. The way wet flesh _shimmers_.)

He was thorough in his attentions. The grip on her heel was gentle but firm, held fast and steady as his other hand pressed the rag—now bubbling with suds—between each of her toes, careful to leave not a spot of her foot uncleansed. She sucked in her breath when he brought the rag down and pressed with his thumb into the arch of her foot, his fingers wrapping around the front of her foot to better accommodate the pressure of his thumb as he squeezed, stroked, kneaded.

Her head tilted back against the porcelain; when she drew in her breath—deep, but shaking—the peaks of her breast broke the surface of the bathwater. In response to the sight—or perhaps in indifference to it—he leaned over the edge of the tub, began to work his way up the length of her leg.

And perhaps she could have withstood the way it felt: the way his hands glided along the strength of her calves, kneading the tension of the road out of them. Thumbs pressing into the meat of her thighs, drawn along the lines of her muscles until they felt deliciously loose. The slipperiness of his soaped hands alternating with the soft texture of the rag. Even when his hands dared slip below the line of the bathwater ( _steam condensing on his face_ ) and when his thumb dragged along the cut of her thigh—that, still, she might have withstood. Tamped and conquered what arousal she felt.

(She drew her bottom lip between her teeth at the grip of his hand on her hip beneath the water—)

But she could not quell the heat that coiled within her, hotter than any drawn bath water, at the expression he wore on his face while he did it: eyebrows just knit enough to deepen the scar on his brow, the set of his lips—a determined mouth—lids drawn every so slightly over his eyes, concentrated. That intense look of fixation. Until now she had only seen him look that way at books, pouring over mysteries of the arcane, or a particularly difficult translation. It was a look that—debauchery aside—made perfectly clear his aim was not to wash the filth of the road from her skin, but to study her (each twitch and hitch of breath, each curl of her toes) as his fingers pressed and dragged: to discover pleasure and then withhold it. To tease, only to relent. And he moved so very _slowly_ , and with such intention.

“Inquisitor, are you blushing?”

And Solas sounded so _pleased_ with himself, knowing full well that ‘blushing’ was an understatement: her hands were tight around the rim of the white tub; her back arched off the porcelain; the lip she’d pulled between her teeth to fight back the pleasure sounds, swollen.

But this was a game, if a small one. A game of roles. And she knew how he liked games. For now, she would allow herself to be teased, allow Solas to draw her pleasure out like the slowness with which honey drips, extends, falls. 

“The bathwater is quite warm,” she said, voice thin with the shallow way she breathed, chest tight. “I’m feeling a little faint, that is all.”

“Is the steam too much for you, Inquisitor? Shall I open a window?”

He did not wait for a response, and then the balcony doors were ajar, and brisk mountain air flooded the room—and then he moved the stool behind her, placed a hand on her shoulders, “sit up,” the instruction given. Obeyed.

She collected her legs back into the tub—they felt weak, unsure and inbetween, tender and loose from the firm touch Solas had delivered but tight with a mounting arousal— and leaned forward, wrapping her legs around her knees. There was the cheery, melodic sound of splashing water, and then she felt the rag make contact with her shoulders, begin to knead down over her upper arms and back. 

Then, “lean back.” Obeyed.

“Closer to me.” Obeyed. She lifted herself a few inches back into the tub, her arms coming to rest once more on its rim.

The rag, throughly lathered, came into view just as she felt Solas lean closer, his breath hot on her ear—as unsteady as her own, rhythmless, anticipating—he squeezed the rag at her throat and watched as the foam ran down her collar and over her breasts, like that bend in the river, the frothing of the tide as it tripped over stones—

Sharp and pitched, she could not help the cry that escaped her when he cupped her soapy breast and squeezed, and she could smell it—that fragrant, springtime, lavender smell—wafting off her chest as his fingers brushed over a nipple— _too gentle, too gentle—_ pert and rigid. And she swore—almost swore, the obscenity perched on the tip of her tongue—she heard Solas _laugh_ behind her, breathy but distinct, and she almost gave it, then, almost told him off and demanded her satisfaction, but she needn’t, because in the next moment he had brought both his hands ‘round, pressed his fingers along each of her ribs before each hand closed around a breast, forefinger and thumb found purchase around a nipple—pinched.

Water sloshed over the sides of the tub with the way her body reacted to that touch, hips jerking off the floor of the tub—a gasp—but the stimulation lasted less than a second before it was gone, purchase too slippery with soap, Solas’ fingers gliding into nothing, grasping air, he breasts left to the cold creeping in the window. 

His name was a whine and a plea and a prayer: “ _Solas._ ” He answered. He leaned; he pressed a kiss, languid and hot, to the notch on her neck below her jaw as his hands ran over her breasts, below the water, down her torso—and then stopped, retreated. Squeezed more soap onto her chest and lighted his middle fingers onto her breasts, gliding circles around her hardened nipples, kissing his way down her neck, across her shoulder.

But it was too much—too much and not enough, each grasp of her breasts woefully brief before his hands lost their grip, slippery fleeting touches of fingertips over nipples. Each touch receding before it brought satisfaction. Balls of her feet braced against the other end of the tub, knees breaching the tub water, quivering. Her thighs were so taut with arousal they practically ached. Pelvis clenched around nothing. 

“Please, _vhenan_ ,” hardly much more than a whisper, barely more than the steam coming off the bath.

“How can I refuse,” he whispered, lips brushing against her ear, “when you ask so nicely?”

His left hand maintained a grip on her breast, fingers rolling over nipple—back and forth, and back—rippling, repeated; his right hand dipped below the water, traced a path down her abdomen that was so slow and tantalizing it had her lifting her pelvis off the base of the tub to greet it. Fingertips combing through pubic hair. Middle finger meandering, pad parting folds—

It pulled a sound deep from the back of her throat, rumbling, keen; pitched into a half-sob when his finger found her clit. No teasing here, no longer; once they’d found that nexus of pleasure his fingers pressed, rubbed, stroked. She did not realize she was rolling her hips against his touch until she heard the bathwater splattering on the stone floor; once she did, she did not care. Everything felt tight and electric and _close_ ; and his lips were still languid along her shoulders, at the top of her spine, at the base of her skull—just behind her ear. All unhurried but each heavy. And his free fingers danced a soapy spiral on her breast, and the tub was too narrow for her to open her legs as wide as she would like—her knees still trembled. Everything in her mind felt soft and tingling, the only thing mooring her to the present Solas’ touch between her legs, persistent, dextrous; each breath she took she fought for, shallow though it was, lungs straining against the sudden onslaught of pleasure that threatened to crush her after being refused so long—

“ _Rosa’da’din sul’em_.” Come for me. And she could hear his voice straining against the words, struggling against his own arousal to keep his voice steady, the words humid and hot against her ear—clearer than the dancing of the water against Solas’ forearm as his hand curled against her, brought each wave of deafening pleasure on faster and faster—

So short of breath and so coiled she could not even manage a moan when the world whited out into nothingness, surrendering, springing— _crashing—_ drawn over the edge and tumbling——

Until the pleasure was nothing more than the ebb of an outgoing tide, a river lapping at a bank. She’d sunk into the tub, following Solas’ hand under, following her orgasm—when she opened her eyes, the sudsy bathwater was licking against her jaw, her chin. Solas’ hands were still holding her—preventing her, she observed, from slipping lower beneath the line of the bathwater.

She swallowed. “When I asked you to stay,” she said, “this wasn’t what I had in mind.”

He hummed a warm sound behind her, press another kiss to the back of her head. “Do you wish I had left you to your own devices?”

Her laugh was immediately: tinkling and clear, like the rivers she’d loved. “No. But now I find myself wishing for something else…”

“And that is?”

“The water is still warm,” she said, wrapping her fingers around the forearm that still crossed her chest. 

“Let me return the favor?”

 

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted to Tumblr as part of DWC.


End file.
